Both of
those posts were made in the shadow of last year's hurricanes. Or, more
precisely, in the shadow of my personal experiences with those hurricanes. I
had learned that in the context of forces you can't control, indecision equals
pain, but decisions equal clarity, and clarity equals the ability and will to
accomplish what you had decided to do.

However, I haven't made a whole
lot of decisions on that scale since the hurricanes. The decision to pursue the
OSAF position was one, and there have been a few modest personal goals here and
there. So I never quite got the hang of this decision-making thing, and you can
see that in my October posts, trying to figure out what it is that makes a
decision a decision, and how to make them. Lately, I had been pondering this
point in the light of my discovery of my own dual nature, and
the consequent realization that I really can do anything I want, given
appropriate amounts of time and resources. However, until/unless I decide what
to do, the massive
computational resources available to me remain largely idle, running the
human equivalent of a screensaver: watching TV and surfing the web.

So
what is a decision, anyway? In last year's posts, I came really, really close
to getting it right, so much so that this phrase jumps out:

Still others recommend "burning your bridges" behind you, so that
you have to go forward or die.

Duh. It's not a decision unless
you can't go back. Otherwise, it's just a preference, tendency, whim,
thought, dream - whatever you want to call it. But it's not a decision. The
thing that makes something a decision is when it's irrevocable. Otherwise, what
you're calling a decision is just a contingency. As I said in the other
article:

If you decide something for a reason, who is
deciding? Can you really call it deciding at all? Or are you just a reed in the
wind, singing a tune for whichever way the wind is blowing?

As I now realize, these two concepts are much more deeply connected than I
imagined. The temporary nature of contingent decisions follows directly from
being based on circumstances. (Because the only unchanging thing about
circumstances, is that they change!) Thus, the strength of the arbitrary
decision is that it can be absolute.

And absolutes have an incredibly
important function, in the same way that axioms function in mathematics and
reasoning. They provide you with a basis for reasoning, a way to filter and
organize your information and activities. They give you a value system, a way
to prioritize, a way to know what your goals should be.

This is not
something I've understood well for most of my life, which I mostly spent
fighting against absolutes that others promoted or sought to impose on me. But
now I understand that absolutes aren't really Absolute in some capital-T Truth
kind of a way. What really matters about an absolute is that you treat it as
axiomatic. Why? Because your brain works much better with axioms, even
relatively arbitrary ones.

This is why religions are mostly a
functional adaptation for our species, despite their tendency to spill over
into fascist or even homicidal irrationalities. If there's one thing that
religions are good at, it's giving people axioms, and axioms don't have to be
rational. You can make up the craziest religion you can think of, and people
will still follow it, because it makes them function better.

In
the book The
Happiness Purpose, Edward deBono actually tries to invent a rational
humanist religion based on the idea that we're here to be happy. He calls it a
"meta-system", because the point is to have a system into which all your other
systems can be put.

Reasoning has to bottom out somewhere, after all. Even
Objectivist philosophers have to start with "A is A", and the idea that the
world our senses tell us exists, really does exist. These axioms are no less
arbitrary than the Holy Trinity or the verses of the Qu'ran, or the
propositions of Euclidean geometry.

Your Brain Doesn't Know You're Making S*** Up...

What's interesting about axioms is
that once you get them set up, your brain responds to them as if they were
real. It's like setting fundamental physical constants, and poof! the universe
changes shape accordingly.

But the really big deal is this: the way the brain
is set up, axioms are allowed to override anything, including all
your evolutionary programming and short-term pleasure seeking.

For
the mind hacker, this is a big deal, an important thing to know about. You see,
aside from childhood experience, your evolutionary programming and short-term
pleasure-seeking are the biggest obstacles in hacking. In The Multiple Self,
I talked about how "you" don't necessarily do what "you" think you want. Maybe
you "decide" to quit smoking, but then later rationalize that "just this one"
won't hurt. This is because your brain is good at supplying you with reasons to
do things you want to do anyway, no matter what you "decided".

My wife,
however, quit smoking many years ago by deciding one day that it was no longer
an option. The key difference between this decision and the many "decisions"
she had made before was that the other times she "quit smoking", she did it
because she was involved with someone who wanted her to quit.

But the time she
actually quit, she quit for "no reason". She just decided to. Not because she
was experiencing health problems, not to please a man. Just because.

Okay, so that's crazy, right? I mean, I didn't decide to spend 14 hours in
blazing sun and pouring rain, working day and night to board up my house last
year "just because". Or did I?

When I look back on what I was thinking
at the time, I realize that I did weigh the possibilities. My wife wanted us to
leave and go to a shelter while there was still time. She didn't believe there
was any way we could possibly finish before the storm was upon us. I didn't
choose to stay and work because it was the rational thing to do, though; I
chose it in spite of the fact that it really wasn't that great of an
idea.

Ultimately, the choice wasn't about the house or the hurricane or
anything like that. It was just my decision. I felt that I had spent too much
of my life running away from things when they got too difficult, and that just
wasn't an option for me any more.

And at that point, it was
axiomatic. Pain didn't matter, fear didn't matter, the rain in my eyes didn't
matter, because quitting was simply not an option. And when your brain knows
something is truly not an option, it doesn't bother trying to convince you
otherwise. Rationalization is something you can only use to justify breaking
rules that you haven't made axiomatic in the first place.

...As Long As You're Only Making It Up About Yourself

Unfortunately, you can't just go around making everything axiomatic that you
think you want to. Your brain is not fooled - it knows why you made something a
rule and it knows when other options exist. Axioms are really about identity -
they're about who you are, not what you think would be a good way to solve a
problem.

I read an interesting book many years ago that summarized what
psychologists knew about people who successfully undertook major changes like
quitting smoking or changing their eating habits. As it turns out, the key
success criterion in the phase just before taking action was that people had to
consider the negative impacts of the change they were contemplating,
and decide they were okay with what they were giving up by changing. Before
that phase, it was important to know about the benefits of the change, but for
changes to stick, it seems we have to understand what the downsides are, and
then do it anyway.

If we don't understand and accept the
downsides of our decisions, we haven't really made them axiomatic, because
we've only considered the upside. When the upside isn't around or takes a long
time to get to, the downsides get a chance to talk us into doing something
"just this once".

And in another peculiar twist, it occurs to me now
that this is another way of looking at The
Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want, whose premise is that the only thing you have to do to
get whatever you want, is to be willing to do whatever it takes! Not
that you need to necessarily actually do everything you initially think
it will take, just that you be willing to deal with whatever you can
imagine it taking.

So, this is a hack that's not really a hack, in the
sense that it's not a way to trick the system into doing something with less
effort. However, it is definitely a timesaver in that if you are contemplating
making a real change of some kind, you can now do it faster and make it stick
harder. Assuming you are already convinced of the upside of a particular course
of action, what you need to do is understand the downside. What are you going
to give up by changing? What's the worst thing that can happen? What might it
cost you to change? If you can honestly consider the downsides, and do what
you're deciding to anyway, then everything you want can be yours for the
taking.